ARIES

ARIES . () – www.brill.nl/arie

The Birth of Esotericism from

the Spirit of Protestantism

Wouter J. Hanegraaff
University of Amsterdam

Abstract
La naissance de l’ésotérisme à partir de l’esprit du protestantisme
Cet article traite de l’émergence et du développement historiques des manières dont
nous entendons actuellement l’“ésotérisme occidental” compris comme domaine relative-
ment autonome de la recherche universitaire. Il en traite en explorant un certain nombre
de moments possibles de sa “naissance”, en partant du présent et, à partir de là, en remon-
tant dans le temps. Déterminantes pour l’émergence de l’ésotérisme occidental en tant que
concept sont les années  (L’ésotérisme, d’Antoine Faivre),  (création de la première
chaire d’Histoire de l’ésotérisme occidental, à l’E.P.H.E. [Paris]),  (le début des con-
férences Eranos), et  (l’Histoire critique du gnosticisme, de Jacques Matter). L’auteur pose
qu’en définissant l’ésotérisme en termes de prétention à la connaissance (recherche de con-
naissance secrète, cachée, dissimulée, supérieure, plus profonde, ou intérieure), les approches
traditionnelles, religionistes, aussi bien que les approches discursives contemporaines de
l’ésotérisme finissent par en faire un concept théorique aux applications potentiellement
universelles et, du même coup, risquent de faire perdre de vue sa spécificité historique. A
l’encontre de ces perspectives, l’auteur défend la manière dont Faivre conçoit l’ésotérisme,
c’est-à-dire, comme une série de courants historiques ayant donné lieu à un corpus référentiel
de textes. Il poursuit en posant que ce que ces courants et ces textes ont en commun n’est
pas, comme le dit Faivre, leur participation à une “forme de pensée”, mais leur exclusion, à
caractère polémique, de la part d’un discours “anti-apologétique” dans le Protestantisme du
ème siècle.

Keywords
Esotericism; Antoine Faivre; Jacques Matter; Ehregott Daniel Colberg; Religionism; Anti-
apologeticism

With playful reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous title, the question I

would like to explore in this article concerns the emergence and development of
our current understanding of “Western esotericism” as a relatively autonomous

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,  DOI: 10.1163/156798910X520593

 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

field of academic research.1 My central thesis is that this origin is to be found

in a heavily polemical Protestant discourse that developed in Germany in the
second half of the th century. In line with the metaphor of “birth and devel-
opment”, I will approach my topic genealogically: taking the contemporary
situation as my starting-point, I will attempt to trace the “family tree” of West-
ern esotericism back into the past as far as possible.

. From Faivre back to Corbin and Eranos

It could well be argued that the present study of Western esotericism as an
academic pursuit was born sixteen years ago, in , with the publication of
Antoine Faivre’s small but influential “Que-sais-je” volume called L’ésotérisme,
which by defining Western esotericism in terms of four intrinsic characteristics,
plus two non-intrinsic ones, created a basic paradigm that was quickly taken
up by a range of later authors up to the present. In previous publications I
have referred to this as the “Faivre paradigm”,2 and there can be no doubt that
it has played a crucial role in getting the field established as a discipline with
a distinct academic identity, and keeps playing a very important role to the
present day.
In proposing his novel definition, Faivre was, of course, attempting to
specify and clarify an academic usage that was already in place before .
“Western esotericism” had been considered a field of research in its own right at
least since the time of Faivre’s appointment as professor of “History of esoteric
and mystical currents in modern and contemporary Europe” thirteen years
previously, in :3 a date that could therefore be seen as an earlier moment

1)
To prevent any misunderstandings: when I speak of the “birth of esotericism” I am
referring neither to the historical origins of the various currents that are seen as belonging to
the field of “Western esotericism”, nor to the historical origins of any purportedly esoteric
“worldview”, “spiritual perspective”, “religious orientation”, “form of thought”, or the like.
I am concerned simply, and exclusively, with the historical origins of a theoretical category;
or in other words, I am interested in the question of when intellectuals and scholars first
began to conceive of a relatively autonomous “field of research” resembling the field that we
now study under the label “Western esotericism”, and why this happened.
2)
In his completely rewritten Introduction to the th edition [] of L’ésotérisme, Faivre
himself briefly mentions this proposal, without further expressing an opinion about it (o.c.,
).
3)
There is no reason to attach any special significance to the fact that this title uses the
adjective “esoteric” rather than the substantive. As for the combination of “esoteric” with
“mystical”, this had to do mostly with matters of faculty politics internal to the E.P.H.E. If
the “mysticism” candidate Michel de Certeau had not lost against the “esotericism” candi-
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

of birth. That year, however, is no absolute point of origin either, for the chair
had in fact been created under a different title fourteen years earlier, in ,
as “History of Esoteric Christianity”. If this first academic chair for esotericism
was therefore born in Paris, at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, its original
conception must be attributed to one of the professors, Henry Corbin, since
it was he who proposed the idea to his colleagues.4
Corbin, of course, was a central representative of the famous Eranos ap-
proach to the study of religion, and certainly had his own vision of esotericism
in mind when he made the proposal. As emphasized by Thomas Hakl in his
definitive history Der verborgene Geist von Eranos, the “Eranos spirit” implied
a view of esotericism entirely different from Faivre’s later definition:

Against the scholarly definition of Antoine Faivre, “esoteric” here means simply the
conscious concern with a religiously motivated way “inwards”, with a “know thyself ”
(your “divine” self ). Or formulated in different words, the “esotericism of Eranos”
is concerned with “individuation”, the “descensus ad inferos = ascensus ad superos”,
which takes places not in the rational and intellectual domain, but in the symbolic
and spiritual domain of the soul, and nevertheless can be known by the intellect.
Hence also the scepsis, which can time and again be noticed at Eranos, against a purely
and exclusively rational attitude, and the deliberate inclusion of analogical “mythical”
thought.5

This difference between an Eranos perspective and Faivre’s later definition

is highly important, as will be seen. It closely parallels the basic opposition
between a “religionist” concept of esotericism and a historical-empirical one:6
an opposition that is present not only in the modern and contemporary study

date Antoine Faivre (see Dosse, Michel de Certeau, –), perhaps “Western esotericism”
would not exist as a field of research the way it exists today.
4)
See Faivre, “La parola ‘esoterismo’ ”. My metaphor of “birth” and “conception” should
not be understood as implying that the E.P.H.E. made any deliberate choice to start a new
specialty called “esotericism”: instead, what happened is that almost by chance—simply
by proposing this particular title—Corbin turns out to have “planted a seed” that would
eventually blossom into the first academic chair devoted to a new academy field (and even
that happened only because the second chairholder, Antoine Faivre, chose to interpret his
assignment in a much broader and more comprehensive sense than his predecessor). It is
only with the second academic chair (University of Amsterdam, ) that a university
made a deliberate choice to create an academic setting for the study of Western esotericism
(albeit under the title “History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents”).
5)
Hakl, Verborgene Geist von Eranos, –.
6)
See e.g. Hanegraaff, ‘Beyond the Yates Paradigm’; id. ‘Study of Western Esotericism’,
; Faivre, L’ésotérisme (th ed.), –.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

of esotericism, but—as I will argue below—was prefigured already at the time

when esotericism was born from the spirit of Protestantism in the second half
of the th century.
Coming back to the creation of the  chair, it is important to emphasize
that no religionist or Eranos concept of “esotericism” was on the minds of
the E.P.H.E. faculty members who adopted Corbin’s proposal. Most of them
knew nothing about Eranos and even if they did they hardly cared about it.
They were simply at a loss as to how to name the chair in a manner that would
suit the specialty of the expected candidate, François Secret (whose work on
Christian kabbalah was well known to them), and finally accepted Corbin’s
title for want of anything better.7 Secret himself, who indeed got elected, was
not at all representative of the spirit of Eranos either; on the contrary, he was a
typical product of the almost positivist historiography of the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes. Only much later, with the appointment of Faivre in , did
the two traditions really come together: the richness and complexity of Faivre’s
oeuvre as a whole derives in no small measure from the fact that it combines the
thorough text-critical historiography typical of the Ecole Pratique, in his great
study of Eckartshausen of 8 and many later writings, and—particularly
in his publications during the s and s—a mythical / symbolic vision
that reflects his own involvement in Eranos and his close association with many
of its central figures, such as Corbin and Eliade.9
Having traced several successive years of birth so far (, , and ),
the next logical step would be to look for the birth of the Eranos approach.
This, however, is far from easy. The Eranos meetings began in , but the
emergence of their characteristic vision cannot easily be linked to a date or a
year—not inappropriately, one might say, for an approach that deemphasizes
historiography in favor of the illud tempus of symbolism and mythology. If
anything definite can be said in this regard, it is that the Eranos vision is
clearly a reaction against certain dominant trends in the study of religion since
the th century: against Enlightenment rationalism it emphasizes symbolism,
mythology and religious experience; against both materialism and sociological
reductionism it defends the autonomy and superiority of ideas; and against
th-century historicism (and what Eliade called the “Terror of History”) it
looks for what is universal and cannot be touched by time. Hence, of course, its
oft-noted affinities with such currents as Romanticism, German Idealism and

7)
Antoine Faivre, personal communication ( March ).
8)
Faivre, Eckartshausen.
9)
See e.g. Hakl, Verborgene Geist von Eranos, –; McCalla, ‘Antoine Faivre’, –.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

Traditionalism.10 If any origin of the Eranos vision should be given, we might

ultimately have to look for reactions against the complex process referred to by
Max Weber as the “disenchantment of the world”.

. Jacques Matter’s “esotericism”

As far as I can see, the next indispensable year in my genealogy prior to  is
the year , when Jacques Matter introduced the substantive “esotericism”
in his Histoire critique du gnosticisme et de son influence.11 Matter’s work would
deserve some closer study, not least in view of the intriguing fact that he not
only wrote a major work on gnosticism, but also published about Martinism
and Swedenborg. It is not insignificant that Matter’s very definition of gnos-
ticism in his book of  might be applied without any trouble to Martinez
de Pasqually’s vision as well:

The emanation of all spiritual beings out of God; the progressive degeneration, from
emanation to emanation, of these beings; the redemption and return of all to the
purity of the Creator and, after the re-establishment of the original harmony of all, the
felicitous and truly divine condition of all in God: those are the fundamental teachings
of gnosticism. A singular mixture of monotheism and pantheism, of spiritualism and
materialism, of christianity and paganism, this system does not overlook anything. …
Behold!, it says, behold the light that emanates from an immense source of light, that
spreads its beneficent rays everywhere: this is how the spirits of light emanate from the
divine light. Behold, again, they cry out, all the sources that feed the earth, that beautify
it, that fertilize and purify it: they emanate from one single, immense ocean. This is
how, from the center of divinity, emanate so many rivers (genii pure like watery crystal)
which shape and fill the world of intelligences. Behold, they finally say, the numbers,
which all emanate from a first number, and which all resemble it, are made from its
essence, and are nevertheless infinitely diverse; and behold the voices, which are made
of so many syllables and elements, all enclosed in the original voice, and nevertheless
of an unlimited variety: thus it is that the world of intelligences has emanated from the
first intelligence, resembling it, and still results in an infinite variety of beings.12

According to Matter, gnosis or gnosticism (the terms are used by him as

interchangeable) emerged as a “third system” between the declining system

10)
Apart from Hakl, Verborgene Geist, see Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion.
11)
As documented in this very volume of Aries, it is only very recently that Monika
Neugebauer-Wölk has discovered a yet earlier, German instance of the substantive “eso-
tericism.” I will not discuss the implications of that discovery here, but refer the reader to
her contribution.
12)
Matter, Histoire critique, I, –.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

of polytheism on the one hand, and the Christianity that had emerged from
Judaism on the other.13 It was essentially an eclecticism, described by him as
‘nothing but the introduction within Christianity of the cosmological and
theosophical speculations that had formed the most important part of the
ancient religions of the Orient, joined with those of the Egyptian, Greek and
Judaic doctrines’ which had been accepted by the platonists.14 Like so many
others in this period, Matter, too, believed that this new system owed its
original impulse to Zoroastrianism, which by being assimilated into Judaism
had given birth to the kabbalah.15
I have given some special attention here to Matter’s concept for three rea-
sons. The first one is simply that, although Matter has been quoted as the
inventor of the term “esotericism” ever since Jean-Pierre Laurant called atten-
tion to the fact in , not much has been written about what he actually
understood by it, and certainly not in English.16 The second reason is that his
“gnosis” or “gnosticism” turns out to be essentially what would be famously
characterized, by Adolf von Harnack, as the “acute hellenization of Christian-
ity”, and we shall see later how essential this concept is to the “birth of esoteri-
cism from the spirit of Protestantism” in the second half of the th century.
Thirdly and finally, it is important to clarify what Matter meant by “esoteri-
cism”. For him it is concerned with “secret teachings” concerned with superior
knowledge (gnosis), reserved for an elite and passed on from the ancient mys-
tery traditions.17 When he speaks of ‘the esotericism of the gnostics’,18 it is this
secret gnosis that he has in mind: hence “esotericism”, for him, is certainly not
a label for a series of historical currents, but rather, an important characteristic
of a current (gnosis or gnosticism) defined as pagan / monotheistic syncretism.
Matter simply adopted the long-standing use of the adjective “esoteric” as
referring to such secret teachings; the only thing new was that he had the idea
(or adopted the earlier German idea) of making a substantive out of it, and this
innovation was picked up by later authors, notably Eliphas Lévi,19 who began

13)
Ibid., I, v.
14)
Ibid, I, .
15)
On the pervasive tendency of seeing kabbalah as having sprung from Zoroastrianism,
see Hanegraaff, ‘Origins of Occultist Kabbalah’.
16)
Laurant’s own brief discussion remains the longest of which I am aware (Laurant,
L’ésotérisme chrétien, ).
17)
Ibid., I, –.
18)
Ibid., II, .
19)
For more details about the career of the term between Matter and Lévi, cf. Hanegraaff,
‘Esotericism’.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

to use it as a general label for much more than ancient gnosticism alone. In
terms of substance, the birth of “esotericism” as understood by Matter therefore
certainly did not start with him: the adjective “esoteric” can be traced back
to the second century20 but the idea of a lineage of secret mystery teachings
is certainly much older, and we shall see that the idea of a “hellenization of
Christianity” leading to pagan / monotheistic syncretism goes back to the th
century at least.

. Secrecy and Inner Wisdom

Having reached this point in our genealogical investigation, we might notice
a peculiar fact. I began my search for the birth-year of “esotericism” from
Faivre’s  booklet, which specifically described the field as consisting of
a series of historical currents in Western culture, and argued that they are
related because they share a certain “form of thought” that can be defined in
terms of four characteristics (to which two further, non-intrinsic ones might
be added). But while trying to discover when that idea was born, we have so
far found something very different. On the one hand, we have encountered the
religionist vision of Eranos, which may have influenced Faivre but is certainly
not the foundation of his mature concept of esotericism; and on the other
hand, we have encountered the notion of secret teachings reserved for an elite,
which Faivre took pains to distinguish from his own understanding of the
field.21 These two understandings of esotericism remain extremely influential
up to the present day, and are often mingled with one another. Along the lines
of Eranos religionism, esotericism is often understood as concerned somehow
with the “inner dimension” of religion, in contrast with its “outer” dimensions
represented by official institutions or doctrinal theology;22 this approach relies

20)
Hanegraaff, ‘Esotericism’, , with reference to the extensive discussions by Riffard,
L’ésotérisme.
21)
See e.g. Faivre, Access, .
22)
Such an understanding of Western esotericism as “inner Western traditions” is basic to
Gnosis magazine, an influential popular journal founded by Jay Kinney, which appeared
from  to , and is linked in various ways to a network of likeminded organizations,
publishers, journals and authors that emerged in the United States since the s. Its
universalist / counterculturalist understanding of “Western esotericism” is grounded in the
Traditionalist notion of a universal “inner” or esoteric truth as opposed to the limited and
merely “outer” visions of religious institutions and dogmatic theologies. It is mainly against
this orientation that the modern study of Western esotericism had to demarcate itself from
the early s on: a process that took place notably during the annual meetings of the
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

on distinctions or polarities such as myth versus history, symbolism versus

doctrine, experiential versus rational knowledge, individual versus collective,
and so on. And the notion of esotericism as concerned with secret teachings is
often mingled with this religionist understanding to such an extent that they
can no longer be kept apart. A perfect recent example is Arthur Versluis’s recent
textbook Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism, which
opens as follows:

Strictly speaking, the term esoteric refers to knowledge reserved for a small group; it
derives from the Greek word esotero, meaning “within” or “inner”. In our context, the
word esoteric implies inner or spiritual knowledge held by a limited circle, as opposed
to exoteric, publicly known or “outer” knowledge. The term Western esotericism, then,
refers to inner or hidden spiritual knowledge transmitted through Western European
historical currents that in turn feed into North American and other non-European
settings.23

This wholly religionist definition puts “knowledge” into the very center—
something, incidentally, which Versluis has in common with the otherwise
extremely different discursive approach to esotericism associated with Kocku
von Stuckrad, who also considers claims of superior knowledge to be crucial
to what the field is all about.24
Here I do not mean to contest the centrality of claims for a special, superior
“knowledge” or “gnosis” to the field of Western esotericism; on the contrary, I
would agree that they are among the most promising candidates when it comes
to selecting central components for a theoretical definition of Western esoteri-
cism.25 We should be wary, however, about the risk of conceptual slippage that
seems hard to avoid in any such approach. By this I mean that starting from
the statement that claims of higher, deeper, or inner knowledge are central to
Western esotericism as a field of research, one easily reverses the logical order

American Academy of Religion (see Faivre, L’ésotérisme [th ed., ], –; Hanegraaff,
‘The Study of Western Esotericism’, – nt ; and Hanegraaff, ‘Kabbalah in Gnosis
Magazine’), where the basic “Gnosis perspective” was represented by an organization which
called itself the “Hermetic Academy”. The perspective typical of Gnosis magazine can also be
found in Kinney, The Inner West, Smoley, Inner Christianity, and Smoley & Kinney, Hidden
Wisdom.
23)
Versluis, Magic and Mysticism, .
24)
Von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism, ; idem, ‘Esoterik in der gegenwärtigen Forschung’;
idem, ‘Western Esotericism’, –. For a critical discussion, cf. Faivre, ‘Kocku von Stuck-
rad’.
25)
Hanegraaff, ‘Trouble with Images’. –; and cf. idem, ‘Reason, Faith, Gnosis’.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

of the argument, and ends up suggesting that anybody who claims a higher,
deeper or inner knowledge of some kind therefore falls within the purview of
the study of esotericism. All cherries may be red, but not everything red is there-
fore a cherry. In the case of Versluis, he does imply that “Western esotericism” is
merely the Western manifestation of something that can be found universally
all over the world and in all periods of history. In the case of von Stuckrad’s
discursive approach, structural similarities with the search for “absolute knowl-
edge” in scientific disciplines that would seem to be far removed from anything
“esoteric”, such as string theory or the modern life sciences, might allow the
latter to be discussed within the context of Western esotericism.26

. Historical Currents
I do not intend to discuss these approaches in further detail here, but rather
wish to highlight what I see as their main disadvantage: a lack of grounding
in history. This can conveniently be done with reference to Faivre. In his
booklet of  and in his later publications, Faivre has sought to describe
the field of Western esotericism as based neither upon religionist perspectives,
nor upon the notion of secrecy; and moreover, an emphasis on some kind
of special “knowledge” is conspicuously absent from his approach.27 What we
find instead, as already mentioned above, is the notion that Western esotericism
consists of a series of specific historical currents; and what they have in common,
according to Faivre, is not some particular claim of knowledge but the fact that
they share a certain air de famille which can be analyzed as a forme de pensée.
Now what are the origins of that concept? When and where was it born?
To address that question I wish to call special attention to two aspects
of Faivre’s argument: first, his notion of an “air de famille”, and second, his
emphasis on what he calls the “referential corpus” of Western esotericism.
Faivre’s approach is different from all the other ones we have encountered so far,
in that it does not start from any abstract notion or concept of “knowledge”—
whether secret, hidden, concealed, higher, deeper, or inner—but from concrete
textual references. His claim is that, starting in the Renaissance, one can observe
the autonomization of a more or less coherent “referential corpus”28 of textual

26)
Von Stuckrad, ‘Western Esotericism’, –.
27)
The closest Faivre comes to emphasizing a special kind of “knowledge” is in his reference
to the imagination as a “cognitive faculty” as part of the rd characteristic of his definition
of Western esotericism.
28)
The notion of a “referential corpus” was highlighted in Faivre, Access,  () and in
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

sources, which constitutes a field in its own right because, as regards their
contents, its components share a certain “air de famille”. At closer scrutiny,
the latter turns out to be based upon a shared “form of thought”, which in
turn can be analyzed, according to Faivre, in terms of his famous four / six
characteristics.
I have reservations about the notion of a “form of thought”29—a term
which, by the way, was suggested to him by his colleague Emile Poulat30—
and hence about the operational value of Faivre’s definition for defining and
demarcating Western esotericism as a field.31 However, in opposition to the

L’ésotérisme (rd ed., ), . Faivre’s formulation of a process of “autonomization” taking

place during the Renaissance was there from the beginning. Please note a bad translation
error in Access, , which should have read ‘This autonomization of a body of knowledge with
respect to [par rapport à] the official religion—increasingly considered “exoteric”—is truly,
in the sixteenth century, the point of departure for what will be called “esotericism” ’ (the
published version misconstrues the sentence structure so that it ends up suggesting that the
new referential corpus was “exoteric”!).
29)
In my ‘Empirical Method’, –, I used the theoretical perspective of Arthur
O. Lovejoy to interpret Faivre’s “form of thought” as referring to an “idea complex” in the
sense of a cluster of related ideas recognizable over time by virtue of family resemblance.
Although I would not consider such an approach wholly invalid, I have since then come
to doubt its usefulness for historical research. My objection is that it runs the risk of creat-
ing artificial phenomenological continuities, by privileging similarities that exist only on a
level of theoretical abstraction, thereby losing sight of historical specificity. For example, the
worldviews of e.g. Pico della Mirandola, Emanuel Swedenborg and Aleister Crowley may
all lay strong emphasis on “correspondences”, but the differences between their understand-
ing of that concept are far more interesting to the historian than the fact that they might
be subsumed under one single category. The latter may be possible theoretically, but results
in a mere abstraction that teaches us more about the interests and agendas of the scholar
doing the subsuming than about the ideas being studied; and moreover, it easily suggests
that their supposed “universality” is what matters most, and as a result tends to turn our
attention away (certainly quite against Faivre’s intentions) from historical specificity and
detail.
30)
Antoine Faivre, personal communication ( March ). Faivre adds that he was
never entirely satisfied by the term, but adopted it for want of having found a better way of
referring to what he had in mind. The term indeed seems to have taken on a life of its own,
sometimes leading to connotations not intended by him.
31)
See also Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, –; idem, ‘The Study of Western Eso-
tericism’, –. Part of the problem has to do with Faivre’s insistence (which is still
there in the most recent version of his argument, L’ésotérisme [th ed., ], ) that the
four basic elements all have to be present in order for something to fall under the rubric
of “Western esotericism”. The inevitable result is that, to give only one example here, a
figure as important as Emanuel Swedenborg would have to be excluded from the field
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

various approaches mentioned earlier, I would like to insist on the validity

of Faivre’s understanding of esotericism as consisting first and foremost of a
series of historical currents, which have resulted in a referential corpus of texts,
the relative coherence of which derives from a shared “air de famille”. In this
regard I have to part company with the discursive approach defended by Kocku
von Stuckrad, who explicitly sets up his own view of esotericism as a ‘structural
element of Western culture’ against the notion of esotericism as referring to a
‘selection of historical “currents” ’.32

of Western esotericism (see Williams-Hogan, ‘The Place of Emanuel Swedenborg’, who

points out that the notion of “living nature” runs counter to Swedenborg’s worldview;
personally I would go even further, and also emphasize the difference between Sweden-
borg’s post-Cartesian understanding of correspondences [cf. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion,
–] and earlier Renaissance concepts, as well as the fact that although Swedenborg
claimed to travel to heaven and hell, he did not claim to do so by means of the imagina-
tion but purely by divine grace). In terms of definition theory, this problem derives from
the fact that Faivre’s definition results in the construction of what is technically known as
a “monothetic class” (see Snoek, Initiations, –). Some might wish to find a solution
by dropping the requirement that all four characteristics must be present, thereby turn-
ing it into a “polythetic class” or a “fuzzy set” (ibid.), as recently proposed by Marco Pasi
(‘Il problema della definizione’), but in that case one will have to deal with the theoreti-
cal disadvantages of those particularly types of classification: as formulated by R. Needham
(see Snoek, o.c., ), members of polythetic classes have the worrying feature that they
‘do not in all cases possess any specific features such as could justify the formulation of
general propositions about them’. My suggestion at this point is that Faivre’s definition
might perhaps remain valid for pointing out something like a “core esotericism” (or eso-
tericism in a strong or classical sense), but does not work as a sharp principle of definition
and demarcation. Unfortunately, in quite a number of publications Faivre’s definition has
already been used (or rather, misused) as a simple “checklist” or lithmus test for deciding
whether something “is esoteric” or not (see Hanegraaff, ‘The Study of Western Esotericism’,
).
32)
Von Stuckrad presents this as his ‘main argument’ in ‘Western esotericism’, . The
‘vagueness’ (o.c., ) which he perceives in my approach, and against which he opposes
his own alternative, is explained by him with reference to a formulation from my entry
‘Esotericism’ in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Hanegraaff, Dictionary,
). But that vagueness seems to exist only because von Stuckrad has lifted the formulation
out of its context, where it did not stand for my own approach or ‘depiction of the field’ at all,
but merely served to explain the general distinction I was making between typological and
historical constructs. I had written that such historical constructs are characterized by the
fact that they understand the term “esotericism” ‘as a general label for certain specific currents
in Western culture that display certain similarities and are historically related’. The double
“certain” to which Von Stuckrad objects so much therefore needed to remain unspecified,
not because of any “vagueness” on my part, but because I was making the point that each
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

In defending these elements of Faivre’s approach (I repeat: minus his notion

of a “form of thought” defined by four basic elements), I will go beyond his own
formulations by arguing that the notion of an “air de famille” need not remain
something vague and intuitive, but has a specific background and historical
origin that can be precisely defined. My claim is that the basic referential corpus
which is nowadays taken for granted as central to Western esotericism was first
conceptualized as a more or less automous domain by Protestant theologians in
the second half of the th century,33 as part of their effort to sharply demarcate
certain34 historical currents from biblical Christianity on the one hand, and
from rational philosophy on the other. What we now refer to as “Western
esotericism” is essentially the very same collection of historical currents that
these theologians had in mind (plus, of course, their further development and
their complex Wirkungsgeschichte since the th century). That we nowadays
see them as sharing an “air de famille” does not really have to do with a “form of
thought” but with two other things. On the one hand, largely mediated by the
Enlightenment, much of the Protestant polemical discourse was inherited as a
largely unexamined and almost unconscious set of assumptions by modern
scholars: the demarcations that they were drawing now seem so natural to
us that we tend to take them for granted. And on the other hand, these
Protestant theologians really did perceive something real, which I believe is
essential to the very nature of Western esotericism but the relevance of which
has been remarkably overlooked: I am referring to the process known as the
Hellenization of Christianity (with its parallels in Judaism35) and the effects that
this process has had in Western culture up to the very present.

such historical construct (whether mine or anyone else’s) is based upon different ideas about
which currents and similarities are most important. In short, Von Stuckrad is setting up a
straw man here, and as a result his argumentation fails to address the theoretical validity of
“historical constructs” as such.
33)
It would go beyond the scope of this article to discuss the reasons why I do not
believe these origins can be found in the Roman Catholic prisca theologia discourse of the
Renaissance, which is grounded in the hellenization of Christianity and therefore represents
the logical antithesis of the protestant position under discussion here. This argument will
be developed in detail in a forthcoming monograph.
34)
Referring to note : I can assure the reader, and Von Stuckrad in particular, that the
word “certain” will be given a specific content!
35)
Even though—surprisingly, to me—in the Jewish context this process was never con-
ceptualized as such, nor became a topic of discussion or controvery as has happened in
Christianity (Elliot R. Wolfson, personal communication, March , ).
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

. Colberg’s “Hermetic-Platonic Christianity”

The birth of Western esotericism understood as a series of specific and related
historical currents took place, I would argue, as a result of what has been
called the “anti-apologetic” tradition in Protestant theology, founded by the
Lutheran historian of philosophy Jacob Thomasius (–).36 His cen-
tral thesis, developed most explicitly in his Schediasma historicum (), was
that Christianity had been infected not just since the Renaissance, but already
since the first centuries by pagan philosophies that were in fact alien to and
incompatible with the biblical faith. In other words, Thomasius exposed the
hellenization of Christianity as a perversion, and argued for a strict separation
of Christian theology and the philosophies of the pagan nations. Thomasius’
approach has been called “anti-apologetic” because it attacked the “apologetic”
tradition of Roman Catholicism, based upon the concept of a translatio sapien-
tiae that allowed for a “concordance” (to use Faivre’s term) between pagan and
Christian traditions. For Thomasius and his followers, the very idea of such
a concordance was the essence of heresy: paganism and God’s Word can have
nothing in common. The eventual result was a sharp distinction between three
domains: () Christian faith based exclusively on the pure biblical message,
() rational philosophy based upon the legitimate but limited capacities of the
human intellect, and () everything else—which in practice meant not only any
kind of pagan religion but, most seriously, also any kind of infiltration of such
pagan religion within the domain of the religions of the book.37
Jacob Thomasius focused on exposing Roman Catholicism as a crypto-
pagan perversion of the biblical faith, but that the logic of anti-apologeticism
could also be used for a different purpose was demonstrated by the Lutheran
theologian Ehregott Daniel Colberg, in his Platonisch-Hermetisches Christen-
thum of  / , which must be recognized, in my opinion, as the land-
mark book that gave birth to the study of Western esotericism as a specific
domain of research.38 Colberg’s central concern was the fight against Protestant

36)
For the concept of “anti-apologeticism” and a very important discussion of its main
representatives starting with Jacob Thomasius, see Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in de Welt-
geschichte.
37)
For the later development of this triad in the work of Jacob Brucker, see Hanegraaff,
‘Western Esotericism in Enlightenment Historiography’.
38)
Faivre seems to have been the first to call attention to Colberg’s importance in this
context, in an article co-published with Karen-Claire Voss (Faivre & Voss, ‘Western Eso-
tericism and the Science of Religion’, ); but it is thanks to the brilliant work of Sicco
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

heterodoxy in his own time, particularly the theosophical teachings linked

to Paracelsus, Weigel, Böhme and Rosicrucianism. Debating with heretics
and reading their books, he discovered that their theology was ‘nothing but
a wicked mixture of Christian faith with the Platonic and Hermetic phi-
losophy’.39 To demonstrate this, he sketched the outlines of a homogeneous
heretical tradition based upon the attempt by the weak and imperfect human
intellect to perceive and understand the mysteries of divinity, which in real-
ity can never be discovered by man but have to be revealed by the Son of
God.

… the mingling of Theology and Philosophy happens mainly in two ways. First, if
one tries to be smarter than Scripture, that is, if with the help of philosophy one tries
to fathom the nature of the revealed mysteries about which God’s Word keeps silent.
Second, if one tries to be smart against Scripture, that is, if one refuses to accept what
does not accord with the blind intellect and its invented axioms.40

The second error was represented particularly by Aristotelian philosophy; but

this was not Colberg’s focus. He concentrates on the first error—trying to
understand the mysteries of Revelation by means of the weak human
intellect—which is represented mainly by the Platonic tradition, significantly
expanded by Colberg so as to include the teachings of Hermes and the kab-
balah.
The human attempt to transcend its own limitations and understand the
divine leads first of all to a focus on “inner knowledge” of the self and of
God: a search for gnosis that should lead to the soul’s restitution and return to
the divine source. This “way inwards” Colberg associates mostly with Platon-
ism, and in the important third chapter of his book he refers to it generally as
“kabbalah”. In the same chapter he distinguishes it from the second main man-
ifestation of heresy: the “way inwards” of platonism and kabbalah turns out to
have its counterpart in the “way outwards”, which seeks knowledge and dom-
ination of the external world. This second domain is associated mostly with
the Hermetic Tradition, and referred to as “magic”. In this manner, Colberg
managed to describe “platonic-hermetic” Christianity as one single hereti-
cal tradition with a double face: the one focused on mystical interiority and
“enthusiasm”, the other focused on the occult sciences such as alchemy, astrol-

Lehmann-Brauns, which includes the best and most detailed discussion of Colberg so far
(Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, –), that his work can now be seen in its proper context.
39)
Colberg, Platonisch-Hermetisches Christenthum, .
40)
Colberg, Platonisch-Hermetisches Christenthum, –.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

ogy and magic. His historical overview led from Pythagorean and Platonic
ideas through the various gnostic sects, Clement of Alexandria and Origen,
manichaeism, Dionysius Areopagita and various medieval heresies, to Ficino
and Agrippa, and from there on to his main targets, to which he devoted
entire chapters: Paracelsianism, Weigelianism, Rosicrucianism, the Quakers
and Böhmian theosophy, as well as the anabaptists, Antoinette Bourignon,
Labadism, and Quietism.
Colberg’s book is the very first one, to my knowledge, that includes essen-
tially all the historical currents nowadays regarded as central to “Western eso-
tericism”; and at least as important is the fact that it does so not randomly, but
on the basis of a clear theoretical concept. Anti-apologeticism has a compelling
internal logic, according to which large areas of Western religion have to be
defined as manifestations of pagan / biblical syncretism. If, within that domain,
one then makes the choice of giving mainstream Roman Catholic theology a
status apart, simply because it is mainstream and therefore “respectable”, one is
left with a domain which contains everything (obviously, up to Colberg’s own
time) that we now study under the rubric of Western esotericism.
Such a move was indeed made by the generations after Colberg, and notably
by the virtual founder of the history of philosophy Jacob Brucker, whose
approach became basic to Enlightenment historiography all over Europe.41 The
result was a new principle of division, categorization or departmentalization, in
which “philosophy”, “science”, and “theology” each came to inhabit their own
clearly demarcated spaces, whose right to exist and participate in intellectual
debate was generally recognized. But as a side-effect of this new situation, what
we now call “Western esotericism” was left to its own devices, to inhabit, as best
as it could, a no-man’s land or liminal conceptual space beyond the boundaries
of polite society: here could be found “all that other stuff” which clearly did
not belong to official philosophy, science and theology.
Seen from such a perspective, one understands that if scholars are now
beginning to recover that domain as an object of serious research, this can
have disconcerting implications. Should we be content merely to create a new,
separate space for it, next to the traditional ones of philosophy, science and
theology? Or should we be more radical, and challenge the very principle of
demarcation and compartmentalization that has caused this field to be set
apart in the first place? Personally I believe that we must opt for the second
possibility, but it is true that such a choice has far-reaching implications that

41)
Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism in Enlightenment Historiography’.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

might ultimately undermine not only the concept of Western esotericism as

a separate category of research, but even our most basic understandings of
“Western identity”.42

. Gottfried Arnold and Esoteric Religionism

My argument implies that Faivre’s understanding of “Western esotericism” as
consisting of a specific series of historical currents, reflected in a “referential
corpus” of texts, has a solid historical foundation. This concept of what the
field is all about was born in , with the first volume of Colberg’s polemic,
and was consolidated due to the work of a series of later authors, notably
Jacob Brucker. This is what I mean with the birth of esotericism from the
(anti-apologetic) spirit of th-century German Protestantism. The further
implication is that not the concept of some esoteric “form of thought”, but
rather, the polemical discourse about paganism and all that it implies must be
given a central place in our understanding of the field.
To this conclusion, one important further observation must be added,
which leads us back to the crucial distinction between religionist and histori-
cal / empirical understandings of Western esotericism. Less than ten years after
Colberg, another German Protestant published a massive opus, which might
likewise claim (and in fact, has been claimed) to be a pioneering work in the
history of Western esotericism. I am referring, of course, to Gottfried Arnold’s
Impartial History of Churches and Heretics of . It seems to me that the
actual relevance of this work to the historical study of Western esotericism has
been greatly exaggerated, and is in fact very minor. If one actually tries to study
the work, one quickly discovers that Arnold makes no attempt to delineate
anything that resembles our modern concepts of Western esotericism: his only
concern is with showing that, through the centuries, the “true Christian mes-
sage” as he sees it has been preserved in so-called heresies as well as in the
established churches.
Extremely interesting from our present vantage point, however, is the re-
markable similarity between Arnold’s approach and that of religionism along
the lines of Eranos. Central to the entire work is the true Christian’s inner expe-
rience of illumination, which, Arnold believes, may be documented historically
but cannot itself be traced historically. As formulated by Lehmann-Brauns:

42)
Hanegraaff, ‘Forbidden Knowledge’; and cf. ‘Western Esotericism in Enlightenment
Historiography’. This theme will be developed fully in my forthcoming monograph (cf.
note ).
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () – 

The decisive point is not the proof provided by historical materials, but the evidence of
inner illumination. Where this is experienced, all historical-critical objections become
irrelevant. … The goal of Arnold’s historiography was that of expounding a “historical
truth” which might be discoved by the criticism of prejudice [Vorurteilskritik] and by
collecting sources, but any adequate evaluation of which remained dependent on the
inner illumination of the historian.43

As a result, Arnold’s great book is based upon the same paradox that is found
so frequently in religionism: that of a “history of esotericism” grounded in a
denial of the historicity of esoteric experience. Accordingly, although Arnold
was aware of Colberg and politely quoted him here and there, he refused to
respond to him, or to be drawn into any historical-critical discussion of mysti-
cal theology and its relation to pagan philosophy:44 in fact, it is amazing to see
how utterly and completely Arnold ignores paganism even in his discussion of
the first centuries of Christianity. His leading assumption was a purely theolog-
ical one: since paganism is obviously something different from the Christian
faith, it is completely irrelevant to a history of Christianity. As a result, he pre-
sented the reader with a wholly decontextualized description of the supposedly
“real” and “pure” Christian faith, and of its many degenerations, which never
result from pagan influence (or from any other historical influence, for that
matter) but must be explained exclusively from the human tendency to sin.
Edifying though such an approach may be for those who share or sympathize
with Arnold’s pietist beliefs, clearly it has nothing to do with historiography or
scholarship.

. Conclusion
I have argued that the concept of Western esotericism as a field of critical his-
torical research, concerned with a specific series of historical currents and their
referential corpus of texts, was born from the “anti-apologetic” spirit of Protes-
tantism in the work of Ehregott Daniel Colberg. The competing religionist
understanding of esotericism, as grounded in a fundamentally ahistorical (or,
as some prefer, transhistorical) experience of illumination paradoxically pre-
sented as a historical phenomenon, may well have been born from the spirit of
Protestantism as well, in the work of his counterpart Gottfried Arnold. To bor-
row Russel McCutcheon’s terminology here, Colberg was a “critic” and Arnold

43)
Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, .
44)
Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, , –.
 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

a “caretaker”.45 The conflict between biblical and pagan traditions in antiquity,

and their long-term historical results, was basic to Colberg, and I suggest it
should be recognized as central to the contemporary study of Western esoteri-
cism as well: the dynamics of this conflict is what constitutes the very core, or
driving energy, central to our field of study. In contrast, the greatest weakness of
the religionist school (including its theological predecessors, such as Arnold)
lies in its remarkable lack of interest in analyzing the historiography of that
same conflict.

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 Wouter J. Hanegraaff / ARIES . () –

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